ANet is a nonprofit dedicated to the premise that every child in America deserves an excellent education and the opportunities it provides. We pursue our vision of educational equality in America by helping schools boost student learning with great teaching that is grounded in standards, informed by data, and built on the successful practices of educators around the country.

ANet blog

As a mission-driven nonprofit organization, our primary concern is helping ensure equitable opportunity for all students.

Working alongside schools, we’ve learned that great teaching is grounded in standards, data, and insights shared among educators. We believe a blog can help us make a difference by spreading the ideas and effective practices of educators we work with.

We’re proud of the expertise our team has built over our ten years, and we'll be featuring contributions from ANetters across the org on topics in which they’ve immersed themselves.

Help us spread opportunity for all students: please share posts that you find valuable with your colleagues. And please add your thoughts in the comments: we would love this blog to facilitate knowledge-sharing in all directions.

People talk about formative and summative assessments. What’s the difference?

The difference lies in their purpose. Simply put, formative means assessment for learning—the results can help teachers plan instruction to meet their students’ current needs. Summative means assessment of learning—the results are for evaluation or accountability.

Are formative assessments better than summative assessments?

It all depends on your goals. Are you asking if your third graders have mastered the learning from that grade before advancing to fourth grade? That’s an important question to ask at the end of the year. That’s summative.

Are you asking how well your students understand a concept—say, of multiplication as equal groups—to decide if you need to re-teach it before moving on? That’s formative. This is what ANet interim assessments are designed for.

Isn’t there too much assessing going on?

Yes! The pressure and high stakes surrounding summative assessments has made teachers and school leaders want to better understand their student’s performance during the course of the year, and that has led to more and more testing.

But the reality of over-testing doesn’t change the fact that those teachers and school leaders do need actionable formative data to guide their instruction and planning. To be useful, that data must be based on high-quality, standards-aligned assessments, like ANet interims.

How do you assess the quality of assessments?

This is a conundrum educators have long struggled to solve. Good news! The Louisiana DOE has solved it for us with the first rigorous, independent review.